Edward the Second. — In a very different style
from mighty Tamburlaine is the tragedy of Ed-
ward the Second. The reluctant pangs of abdi-
cating royalty in Edward furnished hints, which
Shakspeare scarcely improved in his Richard the



40 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS,

Second 3 and the death -scene of Marlowe's king
moves pity and terror beyond any scene antient
or modern with which I am acquainted.

The Rich Jew of Malta. — Marlowe's Jew does
not approach so near to Shakspeare's, as his Ed-
ward the Second does to Richard the Second.
Barabas is a mere monster brought in with a
large painted nose to please the rabble. He kills
in sport, poisons whole nunneries, invents infer-
nal machines. He is just such an exhibition as
a century or two earlier might have been played
before the Londoners " by the royal command,"
when a general pillage and massacre of the He-
brews had been previously resolved on in the
cabinet. It is curious to see a superstition wear-
ing out. The idea of a Jew, which our pious
ancestors contemplated with so much horror,
has nothing in it now revolting. We have tamed
the claws of the beast, and pared its nails, and
now we take it to our arms, fondle it, write
plays to flatter it ; it is visited by princes, affects
a taste, patronizes the arts, and is the only libe-
ral and gentlemanlike thing in Christendom.

Doctor Faustus. — The growing horrors of Faus-
tus's last scene are awfully marked by the hours
and half hours as they expire, and bring him



CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 41

nearer and nearer to the exactment of his dire
compact. It is indeed an agony and a fearful
colluctation. Marlowe is said to have been
tainted with atheistical positions, to have denied
God and the Trinity. To such a genius the his-
tory of Faustus must have been delectable food :
to wander in fields where curiosity is forbidden
to go, to approach the dark gulf near enough to
look in, to be busied in speculations which are
the rottenest part of the core of the fruit that
fell from the tree of knowledge.* Barabas the
Jew, and Faustus the conjurer, are offsprings of
a mind which at least delighted to dally with in-
terdicted subjects. They both talk a language
which a believer would have been tender of put-
ting into the mouth of a character though but
in fiction. But the holiest minds have some-
times not thought it reprehensible to counterfeit
impiety in the person of another, to bring Vice
upon the stage speaking her own dialect ; and,
themselves being armed with an unction of self-
confident impunity, have not scrupled to handle

* Error, entering- into the world with Sin among- us
poor Adamites, may be said to spring from the tree of
knowledge itself, and from the rotten kernels of that
fatal apple. — Howell's Letters.



42 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS^

and touch that famiUarly, which would be death
to others. Milton in the person of Satan has
started speculations hardier than any which the
feeble armoury of the athiest ever furnished ',
and the precise, strait-laced Richardson has
strengthened Vice, from the mouth of Love-
lace, with entangling sophistries and abstruse
pleas against her adversary Virtue, which Sedley,
Villiers, and Rochester, wanted depth of liber-
tinism enough to have invented.

THOMAS DECKER.

Old Fortunatus. — The humour of a frantic lover,
in the scene where Orleans to his friend Gallo-
way defends the passion with which himself,
being a prisoner in the English king's court, is
enamoured to frenzy of the king's daughter
Agripyna, is done to the life. Orleans is as pas-
sionate an inamorato as any which Shakspeare
ever drew. He is just such another adept in
Love's reasons. The sober people of the world
are with him



-A swarm of fools



Crowding together to be counted wise.
He talks ^^ pure Biron and Romeo," he is almost



CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 43

as poetical as they, quite as philosophical, only
a little madder. After all. Love's sectaries are
a reason unto themselves. We have gone retro-
grade to the noble heresy, since the days when
Sidney proselyted our nation to this mixed health
and disease 3 the kindliest symptom, yet the most
alarming crisis in the ticklish state of youth 3 the
nourisher and the destroyer of hopeful wits 3 the
mother of twin births, wisdom and folly, valour
and weakness 3 the servitude above freedom 3 the
gentle mind's religion 3 the liberal superstition.

The Honest Whore. — There is in the second
part of this play, where Bellafront, a reclaimed
harlot, recounts some of the miseries of her pro-
fession, a simple picture of honour and shame,
contrasted without violence, and expiessed with-
out immodesty, which is worth all the strong
lines against the harlot's profession, with which
both parts of this play are offensively crowded.
A satirist is always to be suspected, who, to make
vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and minutest
circumstances with a sort of relish and retro-
spective fondness. But so near are the boun-
daries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-
out sinner is sometimes found to make the best
declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned



44 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS,

descriptions, which in his unregenerate state
served but to inflame his appetites, in his new
province of a moralist will serve him, a little
turned, to expose the enormity of those appe-
tites in other men. When Cervantes with such
proficiency of fondness dwells upon the Don's
library, who sees not that he has been a great
reader of books of knight-errantry — perhaps was
at some time of his life in danger of falling into
those very extravagancies which he ridiculed so
happily in his hero ?

JOHN MARSTON.

Antonio and Mellida. — The situation of An-
drugio and Lucio, in the first part of this trage-
dy, where Andrugio Duke of Genoa banished
his country, with the loss of a son supposed
drowned, is cast upon the territory of his mortal
enemy the Duke of Venice, with no attendants
but Lucio an old nobleman, and a page re-
sembles that of Lear and Kent in that king's
distresses, Andrugio, like Lear, manifests a king-
like impatience, a turbulent greatness, an affect-
ed resignation. The enemies which he enters
lists to combat, *' Despair and mighty Grief and
sharp Impatience," and the forces which he



CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 46

brings to vanquish them, ^' cornets of horse,"
&c. are in the boldest style of allegory. They
are such a " race of mourners" as the '^ infection
of sorrows loud" in the intellect might beget on
some ^'^ pregnant cloud" in the imagination. The
prologue to the second part, for its passionate
earnestness, and for the tragic note of prepara-
tion which it sounds, might have preceded one
of those old tales of Thebes or Pelops' line, which
Milton has so highly commended, as free from
the common error of the poets in his day, of
'' intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness
and gravity, brought in without discretion cor-
ruptly to gratify the people." It is as solemn a
preparative as the " warning voice which he
who saw the Apocalyps heard cry."

What You Will. — I shall ne'er forget how he
went cloatKd. Actl. Scene 1. — To judge of the
liberality of these notions of dress, we must ad-
vert to the days of Gresham, and the consterna-
tion which a phenomenon habited like the mer-
chant here described would have excited among
the flat round caps and cloth stockings upon
Change, when those '' original arguments or
tokens of a citizen's vocation were in fashion, not
more for thrift and usefulness than for distinction



46 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS^

and grace." The blank uniformity to which all
professional distinctions in apparel have been
long hastening, is one instance of the decay of
symbols among us, which, whether it has con-
tributed or not to make us a more intellectual,
has certainly made us a less imaginative people.
Shakspeare knew the force of signs : a ^' malig-
nant and a turban'd Turk." This '^ meal-cap
miller," says the author of God's Revenge against
Murder, to express his indignation at an atroci-
ous outrage committed by the miller Pierot upon
the person of the fair Marieta.

AUTHOR UNKNOWN.

The Merry Devil of Edmonton. — The scene in
this delightful comedy, in which Jerningham,
" with the true feeling of a zealous friend,"
touches the griefs of Mounchensey, seems writ-
ten to make the reader happy. Few of our
dramatists or novelists have attended enough
to this. They torture and wound us abundant-
ly. They are economists only in delight. No-
thing can be finer, more gentlemanlike, and
noblei", than the conversation and compliments
of these young men. How delicious is Raymond
Mounchensey's forgetting, in his fears, that Jer-



CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 47

ningham has a '' Saint in Essex 5" and how
sweetly his friend reminds him ! I wish it could
be ascertained^ which there is some grounds for
beHe\dng, that Michael Drayton was the author
of this piece. It would add a worthy appendage
to the renown of that Panegyrist of my native
Earth 3 who has gone over her soil, in his Poly-
olbion, with the fidelity of a herald, and the
painful love of a son ; who has not left a rivulet,
so narrow that it may be stept over, without
honorable mention ; and has animated hills and
streams with life and passion beyond the dreams
of old mythology.

THOMAS HEYWOOD.

A Woman Killed with Kindness. — Heywood is a
sort of prose Shakspeare. His scenes are to the
full as natural and affecting. But we miss the
poet, that which in Shakspeare always appears
out and above the surface of the nature. Hey-
wood' s characters in this play, for instance, his
country gentlemen, &c. are exactly what we see,
but of the best kind of what we see, in life.
Shakspeare makes us believe, while we are among
his lovely creations, that they are nothing but
what we are familiar with, as in dreams new



48 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS,

things seem old ; but we awake, and sigh for
the difference.

The English Traveller. — Hey wood's preface to
this play is interesting, as it shews the heroic
indifference about the opinion of posterity, which
some of these great writers seem to have felt.
There is a magnanimity in authorship as in every
thing else. His ambition seems to have been
confined to the pleasure of hearing the players
speak his lines while he lived. It does not ap-
pear that he ever contemplated the possibility of
being read by after ages. What a slender pit-
tance of fame was motive sufficient to the pro-
duction of such plays as the English Traveller,
the Challenge for Beauty, and the Woman Killed
with Kindness ! Posterity is bound to take care
that a writer loses nothing by such a noble mo-
desty.

THOMAS MIDDLETON AND WILLIAM ROWLEY.

A Fair Quarrel. — The insipid levelling morality
to which the modern stage is tied down, would
not admit of such admirable passions as these
scenes are filled with. A puritanical obtuseness
of sentiment, a stupid infantile goodness, is
creeping among us^ instead of the vigorous



CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 49

passions, and virtues clad in flesh and blood,
with which the old dramatists present us. Those
noble and liberal casuists could discern in the
differences, the quarrels, the animosities of men,
a beauty and truth of moral feeling, no less than
in the everlastingly inculcated duties of forgive-
ness and atonement. With us, all is hypocritical
meekness. A reconciliation-scene, be the occa-
sion never so absurd, never fails of applause.
Our audiences come to the theatre to be com-
plimented on their goodness. They compare
notes with the amiable characters in the play,
and find a wonderful sympathy of disposition
between them. We have a common stock of
dramatic moralit)', out of which a writer may
be supplied without the trouble of copying it
from originals within his own breast. To know
the boundaries of honour, to be judiciously va-
liant, to have a temperance which shall beget a
smoothness in the angry swellings of youth, to
esteem life as nothing when the sacred reputa-
tion of a parent is to be defended, yet to shake
and tremble under a pious cowardice when that
ark of an honest confidence is found to be frail
and tottering, to feel the true blows of a real
disgrace blunting that sword which the imagi^

VOL. II. E



50 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS^

nary strokes of a supposed false imputation had
put so keen an edge upon but lately : to do^ or
to imagine this done in a feigned story, asks
something more of a moral sense, somewhat a
greater delicacy of perception in questions of
right and wrong, than goes to the writing of
two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws
of honour as opposed to the laws of the land,
or a common-place against duelling. Yet such
things would stand a writer now-a-days in far
better stead than Captain Agar and his consci-
entious honour -, and he would be considered as
a far better teacher of morality than old Rowley
or Middleton, if they were living.

WILLIAM ROWLEY,

A New Wonder; a Woman Never Vext.—The
old play-writers are distinguished by an honest
boldness of exhibition, they shew every thing
without being ashamed. If a reverse in fortune
is to be exhibited, they fairly bring us to the
prison-grate and the alms-basket. A poor man
on our stage is always a gentleman, he may be
known by a peculiar neatness of apparel, and by
wearing black. Our delicacy in fact forbids the
dramatizing of distress at all. It is never shewn



CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 51

in its essential properties ; it appears but as the
adjunct of some virtue, as something which is
to be relieved, from the approbation of which re-
lief the spectators are to derive a certain sooth-
ing of self- referred satisfaction. We turn away
from the real essences of things to hunt after
their relative shadows, moral duties ; whereas,
if the truth of things were fairly represented,
the relative duties might be safely trusted to
themselves, and moral philosophy lose the name
of a science.

THOMAS MIDDLETON.

The M-itch. — Though some resemblance may be
traced between the charms in Macbeth, and the
incantations in this play, which is supposed to
have preceded it, this coincidence will not de-
tract much from the originality of Shakspeare.
His witches are distinguished from the witches
of Middle ton by essential differences. These
are creatures to whom man or woman, plotting
some dire mischief, might resort for occasional
consultation. Those originate deeds of blood,
and begin bad impulses to men. From the mo-
ment that their eyes first meet with Macbeth's,



5^ CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS,

he is spell-bound. That meeting sways his des-
tiny. He can never break the fascination. These
witches can hurt the body, those have power
over the soul. Hecate in Middleton has a son,
a low buffoon : the hags of Shakspeare have nei-
ther child of their own, nor seem to be descended
from any parent. They are foul anomalies, of
whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor
whether they have beginning or ending. As
they are without human passions, so they seem
to be without human relations. They come with
thunder and lightning, and vanish to airy music.
This is all we know of them. Except Hecate,
they have no names; which heightens their mys-
teriousness. The names, and some of the pro-
perties, which the other author has given to his
hags, excite smiles. The Weird Sisters are se-
rious things. Their presence cannot co-exist
with mirth. But, in a lesser degree, the witches
of Middleton are fine creations. Their power
too is, in some measure, over the mind. They
raise jars, jealousies, strifes, '' like a thick
scurf" over life.



CONTEMPORABY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 53

WILLIAM ROWLEY, THOMAS DECKER,

JOHJf FORD, &c.

The Witch of Edmonton. — Mother Sawyer, in
this wild play, differs from the hags of both
Middletoii and Shakspeare. She is the plain
traditional old woman witch of our ancestors j
poor, deformed, and ignorant ; the terror of vil-
lages, herself amenable to a justice. That should
be a hardy sheriff, with the power of the county
at his heels, that would lay hands upon the
Weird Sisters, They are of another jurisdiction.
But upon the common and received opinion, the
author (or authors) have engrafted strong fancy.
There is something frightfully earnest in her in-
vocations to the Familiar.

CYRIL TOURNEUR.

The Revengers'' Tragedy. — The reality and life
of the dialogue, in which Vindici and Hippolito
first tempt their mother, and then threaten her
with death for consenting to the dishonour of
their sister, passes any scenical illusion I ever
felt. I never read it but my ears tingle, and I
feel a hot blush overspread my cheeks, as if I
were presently about to proclaim such malefac-



54 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS,

tions of myself as the brothers here rebuke in
their unnatural parent, in words more keen and
dagger-like than those which Hamlet speaks to
his mother. Such power has the passion of
shame truly personated, not only to strike guilty
creatures unto the soul, but to '' appal " even
those that are " free."

JOHN WEBSTER.

The Duchess of Malfy. — All the several parts
of the dreadful apparatus with which the death
of the Duchess is ushered in, the waxen images
which counterfeit death, the wild masque of
madmen, the tomb-maker, the bellman, the liv-
ing person's dirge, the mortification by degrees,
— are not more remote from the conceptions of
ordinary vengeance, than the strange character
of suffering which they seem to bring upon their
victim is out of the imagination of ordinary
poets. As they are not like inflictions of this
life, so her language seems not of this world.
She has lived among horrors till she is become
" native and endowed unto that element." She
speaks the dialect of despair 3 her tongue has a
smatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale. To
move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the



CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 55

quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to
wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and
then step in with mortal instruments to take its
last forfeit : this only a Webster can do. Infe-
rior geniuses may '' upon horror's head horrors
accumulate," but they cannot do this. They
mistake quantity for quality 3 they " terrify babes
with painted devils j" but they know not how a
soul is to be moved. Their terrors want dig-
nity, their aifrightments are without decorum.

The White Devil , or Vittoria Corombona. —
This White Devil of Italy sets otF a bad cause so
speciously, and pleads with such an innocence-
resembling boldness, that we seem to see that
matchless beauty of her face which inspires such
gay confidence into her, and are ready to expect,
when she has done her pleadings, that her very
judges, her accusers, the grave ambassadors who
sit as spectators, and all the court, will rise and
make proffer to defend her in spite of the utmost
conviction of her guilt ; as the Shepherds in Don
Quixote make proffer to follow the beautiful
Shepherdess Marcela, '' without making any
profit of her manifest resolution made there in
their hearing."



/



56 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS,

So sweet and lovely does she make the shame.
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose.
Does spot the beauty of her budding name!

T never saw any thing like the funeral dirge in
this play, for the death of Marcello, except the
ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned
father in the Tempest. As that is of the water,
watery 3 so this is of the earth, earthy. Both
have that intenseness of feeling, which seems to
resolve itself into the element wtiich it contem-
plates.

In a note on the Spanish Tragedy in the Spe-
cimens, I have said that there is nothing in the
undoubted plays of Jonson which would autho-
rize us to suppose that he could have supplied
the additions to Hieronymo. I suspected the
agency of some more potent spirit. I thought
that Webster might have furnished them. They
seemed full of that wild, solemn, preternatural
cast of grief which bewilders us in the Duchess
of Malfy. On second consideration, I think this
a hasty criticism. They are more like the over-
flowing griefs and talking distraction of Titus
Andronicus. The sorrows of the Duchess set
inward ; if she talks, it is little more than soli-



CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 57

loqiiy imitating conversation in a kind of bra-
very.

JOHN FORD.

The Broken Heart. — I do not know where to find,
in any play, a catastrophe so grand, so solemn, and
so surprising as in this. This is indeed, accord-
ing to Milton, to describe high passions and high
actions. The fortitude of the Spartan boy,
who let a beast gnaw out his bowels till he died
without expressing a groan, is a faint bodily
image of this dilaceration of the spirit, and ex-
enteration of the inmost mind, which Calantha,
with a holy violence against her nature, keeps
closely covered, till the last duties of a wife and
a queen are fulfilled. Stories of martyrdom are
but of chains and the stake ; a little bodily suf-
fering. These torments

On the purest spirits prey,

As on entrails, joints, and limbs.

With answerable pains, but more intense.

What a noble thing is the soul in its strengths
and in its weaknesses ! Who would be less weak
than Calantha ? Who can be so strong ? The ex-
pression of this transcendant scene almost bears
us in imagination to Calvary and the Cross 3 and



58 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS,

we seem to perceive some analogy between the
scenical sufferings which we are here contem-
plating, and the real agonies of that final com-
pletion to which we dare no more than hint a
reference. Ford was of the first order of poets.
He sought for sublimity, not by parcels, in me-
taphors or visible images, but directly where she
has her full residence in the heart of man ; in the
actions and sufferings of the greatest minds.
There is a grandeur of the soul above mountains,
seas, and the elements. Even in the poor per-
verted reason of Giovanni and Annabella, in the
play* which stands at the head of the modern
collection of the works of this author, we discern
traces of that fiery particle, which, in the irre-
gular starting from out the road of beaten action,
discovers something of a right line even in obli-
quity, and shews hints of an improveable great-
ness in the lowest descents and degradations of
our nature.

FULKE GREVILLLE, LORD BROOKE.

Alaham, Mustapha. — The two tragedies of
Lord Brooke, printed among his poems, might

* 'Tis Pity she is a Whore.



CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE. 59

with more propriety liavc been termed poli-
tical treatises than plays. Their author has
strangely contrived to make passion, charac-
ter, and interest, of the highest order, sub-
servient to the expression of state dogmas and
mysteries. He is nine parts Machiavel and
Tacitus, for one part Sophocles or Seneca. In
this writer's estimate of the powers of the mind,
the understanding must have held a most tyran-
nical pre-eminence. Whether we look into his
plays, or his most passionate love-poems, we
shall find all frozen and made rigid with intel-
lect. The finest movements of the human heart,
the utmost grandeur of which the soul is capa-
ble, are essentially comprised in the actions and
speeches of Caelica and Camena. Shakspeare,
who seems to have had a peculiar delight in con-
templating womanly perfection, whom for his
many sweet images of female excellence all wo-
men are in an especial manner bound to love,
has not raised the ideal of the female character
higher than Lord Brooke, in these two women,
has done. But it requires a study equivalent to
the learning of a new language to understand
their meaning when they speak. It is indeed
hard to hit :



60 CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS,,

Much like thy riddle, Samson, in one day
Or seven though one should musing sit.

It is as if a being of pure intellect should take
upon him to express the emotions of our sensi^
tive natures. There would be all knowledge, but
sympathetic expressions would be wanting.

EEN JONSON.

The Case is Altered. — The passion for wealth has
worn out much of its grossness in tract of time.
Our ancestors certainly conceived of money as
able to confer a distinct gratification in itself,
not considered simply as a symbol of wealth. The
old poets, when they introduce a miser, make
him address his gold as his mistress; as some-
thing to be seen, felt, and hugged ; as capable
of satisfying two of the senses at least. The sub-